Some days you get out of bed and one of the first things you read is a piece pressuring young women—-and explicitly just women—-to get married young, and you want to go right back to bed. Is this 2009? Is Mark Regnerus aware that women aren’t legally considered chattel any more? Well, of course, and he’s not having it.
The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That’s up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren’t pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn’t be complaining.
Really, you have to give him points for honesty. A lot of social conservatives take a stab at pretending to be egalitarian about this. For instance, they make purity rings for boys, even if they’re not usually expected to wear them.
The whole piece is an exercise of Regnerus saying things that are actually good things in this mournful tone, and hoping that substitutes for an argument. It’s a weird strategy. Like this:
The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years. I used to think that only young men—and a minority at that—lamented marriage as the death of youth, freedom and their ability to do as they pleased. Now this idea is attracting women, too.
That’s like saying: “It used to be that everyone smoked inside and out, and everything stank to high heaven and everyone died of lung cancer. You kids don’t know how good we had it.” Sometimes arguing from tradition is merely irritating. Sometimes it’s beyond fucking stupid. But I suppose the good thing is that Regnerus is coming right out and stating a value that social conservatives tend to avoid baldly stating—-they desire young marriage (for women), because it’s an effective tool at clipping women’s wings. But this is rarely stated outright. It is the whole reason for abstinence-only and other movements against making contraception available and acceptable to young people, though. The hope is that teenagers will get pregnant and “do the responsible thing”, i.e. they’re trying to use subterfuge to get the desired results. That’s why most of America thought Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was devastating to Sarah Palin’s image, but it in fact made the base love Palin more. Though now that they’re seeing that the young marriage they hoped for is drying up, perhaps that will change.